18 
EXPANSION OF ENGLAND. 
[lect. 
brawls of the Wilkes period, the miserable American war ; 
everywhere alike we seem to remark a want of great 
ness, a distressing commonness and flatness in men and 
in affairs. But what we chiefly miss is unity. In France 
the corresponding period has just as little greatness, but it 
has unity; it is intelligible; we can describe it in one 
word as the age of the approach of the Revolution. But 
what is the English eighteenth century, and what has 
come of it? What was approaching then? 
But do we take the right way to discover the unity of 
a historical period ? 
We have an unfortunate habit of distributing historical 
affairs under reigns. We do this mechanically, as it were, 
even in periods where we recognise, nay, where we ex 
aggerate, the insignificance of the monarch. The first 
Georges were, in my opinion, by no means so insignificant 
as is often supposed, but even the most influential sovereign 
has seldom a right to give his name to an age. Much 
misconception, for example, has arisen out of the expression, 
Age of Louis XIV. The first step then in arranging and 
dividing any period of English history is to get rid of such 
useless headings as Reign of Queen Anne, Reign of George I., 
Reign of George II. In place of these we must study to 
put divisions founded upon some real stage of progress 
in the national life. We must look onward not from king 
to king, but from great event to great event. And in 
order to do this we must estimate events, measure their 
greatness; a thing which cannot be done without con 
sidering them and analysing them closely. When with 
respect to any event we have satisfied ourselves that it 
deserves to rank among the leading events of the national 
history, the next step is to trace the causes by which it 
was produced. In this way each event takes the character